Things came full circle Thursday when Fred O. Williams visited the Central Library to talk about his recently published book, “Fight Back Against Unfair Debt Collection Practices: Know your rights and protect yourself from threats, lies, and intimidation.”

Williams started his research into unsavory debt collection practices in 1999 on his beat as a business reporter for The Buffalo News.

“I felt something important was going on in the industry that needed a closer look,” Williams said. “Something was going off the rails.”

From 1999, when Williams started his research, until 2009, consumer complaints about third-party debt collection agencies to the Federal Trade Commission increased from about 12,000 to roughly 88,000.

That, Williams said, indicates that the number of threatening calls and the use of illegal tactics by collection agencies have increased dramatically.

The reason? Bullying tactics work. Posing as a police officer or lawyer, threatening to bring criminal credit fraud charges and calling co-workers with embarrassing details about a debt often get people to pay, even if the tactics are illegal.

In fact, one of the top complaints every year is consumers being hounded to pay bills they do not even owe.

“Whether a debt is legitimate or not is secondary to the full-on effort to get money,” Williams said.

The problem has been made worse as the debt market has heated up, allowing just about anyone with a phone to buy debt from banks for roughly 5 percent of the balance. The penalties against engaging in illegal collection practices are so low ($1,000) and the enforcement so lax that scammers know the benefits of operating illegally far outweigh the risks.

Though Buffalo has had some high-profile snares in the debt-collection industry, such as the Lancaster man recently caught running an agency from inside a federal prison, crackdowns by the State Attorney General’s Office do little to deter the bad actors.

“Individual companies and agents are not the issue. They’re doing the best within the system they’ve been given,” Williams said. “And as long as it’s profitable, they’re going to keep doing it.”

Requiring national licensing for collection agencies would make it easier to enforce the many rules already in place to protect consumers, Williams said. Raising the penalty fees and requiring companies to be bonded and prepay penalties would also encourage them to play by the rules.

Extensive research conducted by Williams during a Kiplinger- supported fellowship at Ohio State University in 2006 resulted in a three-part series for The News called Merchants of Debt. In 2008, Williams got an even closer look at the industry when he went to work for 11 weeks at a Western New York debt collection agency.

Williams also found that Western New York has one of the most saturated debt collection markets for its population, with roughly 4,000 to 5,000 people working in the industry locally.

“It used to be that people could get a job right out of high school at Bethlehem Steel. Now those jobs are in collections,” Williams said.

schristmann@buffnews.comnull